Upon starting Google Chrome today, I noticed a couple of the icons for Google Apps on the New Tab page have changed overnight – namely Google Calendar, Reader and Maps – presumably another minor step in the major Google redesign we have been experiencing for months now. The change only took a couple of minutes to propagate to my other version of Chrome, the Canary Channel. If you check the Chrome Web Store, the apps already display the new icons there; YouTube has a different icon as well, which will probably be rolled out to the installed apps in Chrome. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any new functionality added to the apps, they remain simple hyperlinks to the online services. Especially the Calendar app could learn some tricks from the website, which changes the favicon daily to reflect the current date.
And while publishing this article, the Gmail app got an update as well, resembling the Offline Gmail app.
For those of you who have enabled the new, grey, version of the Google bar, the icons will probably look familiar, because the’re larger versions of those favicons. Probably a sign that this piece of design will find it’s way to most users soon.
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